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Migratory Spirits

To dispense with the longstanding book reviewing practice of first-paragraph throat clearing, may I offer up Richard Powers’s “Echo Maker” as a wise and elegant post-9/11 novel? It avoids some of the now familiar features of the genre. It does not unfold in the sunny spring and summer before the disaster, placing the shallow high jinks and aspirations of the characters in stark relief by our knowledge of the looming event, ending perhaps with a dissipated yuppie waking on that September morning and relishing what a nice blue day it is outside. Nor does the book open in the anxious days after the attack, with the characters wandering the white, deserted streets and wondering, “How can I ever go back to my superficial preoccupations over high-thread-count sheets / that new S.U.V. / my [insert timely, vapid cultural signifier here].” “The Echo Maker” is not an elegy for How We Used to Live or a salute to Coming to Grips, but a quiet exploration of how we survive, day to day.

The catastrophe that kicks things off is a small one in the scheme of things, solitary. Late one winter night, Mark Schluter’s truck overturns on a lonesome stretch of highway outside Kearney, Neb. An anonymous person calls in the accident, and Mark is transported to the hospital, where, after an initially optimistic prognosis, he falls into a coma. Karin Schluter rushes back to her hometown to see her brother and discovers a strange handwritten note by his bedside: “I am No One / but Tonight on North Line Road / GOD led me to you / so You could Live / and bring back someone else.” Author unknown.

What caused the accident, no one can say — the only witnesses are the sandhill cranes, half a million of them, who stop outside Kearney each year on their migratory journey. Ancient and silent, the birds “dance as they have since before this river started,” re-enacting their hard-wired ritual of departure and homecoming. That Powers will use these denizens of the natural world as feathered avatars of his human characters is a given; that he is able to tease out surprising resonances is part of his gift.

Karin sees her brother’s recovery as a chance to “restart them both.” Raised by unstable parents, the Schluter kids have never really found their footing. Mark has perfected a dingy existence, passing the time with video games, beer and general lunkhead-ery. Karin, while a bit more high-functioning, has nonetheless settled into a life of lukewarm comforts, working days calming irate customers of a local computer company and spending her nights in “nice little shared nervousness with a friendly mammal in tech support that threatened to turn into a relationship any month now.” Until, with the news of her brother’s accident, “reality found her out again.”

Her good intentions are spoiled when Mark emerges from his coma with a rare case of Capgras syndrome, a kind of amnesia of affection whereby the sufferer remembers everything about his life, but cannot recall the important emotional connections. According to his new brain, his sister is “the actress Karin,” the “pretend sister,” an imposter playing a game on him. His dog is not his dog, its enthusiastic yipping aside, and his own house is a carbon-copy fake.

Powers has chosen a brain disorder that doubles as handy metaphor for human miscommunication of all kinds, and then added one more element to the mix, in the form of Gerald Weber — “the natty neuroscientist,” “the Beau Brummell of brain research” — who comes to town to lend a hand, or at least gather material for his collection of psychological oddities. Weber is a popular writer-clinician in the mold of Oliver Sacks and the author of books like “The Country of Surprise,” the kind with dependable “The Noun of Noun” titles that always seem to find a comfortable berth on the best-seller charts. Nestled in his dapper success, cozy in his 30-year marriage, Weber possesses a kind of spiritual ease completely alien to the Schluter siblings.

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Brian Michael Weaver

He parachutes into Kearney, visits with Mark, takes some notes, blithely prescribes some behavioral therapy and then whisks himself away. But as luck would have it, his pilgrimage out West coincides with a disturbance in his professional life: the critics have turned on him. Harper’s describes his latest work as a bunch of “familiar and slightly cartoonish tales ... even as his stories border on privacy violations and sideshow exploitation.” The Times, the damned Times, kicks him when he’s down. And most humiliating of all, a parodic New Yorker Shouts & Murmurs piece called “From the Files of Dr. Frontalobe” appears, featuring “the woman who used her husband as a tea cozy” and “the man who turned multiple-personality in order to use the HOV lane,” making Weber wonder if he should self-prescribe something to take the edge off.

Back in Nebraska, the Schluters continue to unravel. Alienated from his friends and former life and psychologically deteriorating, Mark becomes a ghost in his own life. Karin, labeled a fraud by her brother, starts to agree with that verdict, as she reconnects with an old lover (“The accident permitted that, too. Made everyone briefly better than they were”) and completes her migration back to the old existential turf she came from: “He says I’m an imposter? He’s right. I’ve never done anything but go through the motions.” An animal guided by instinct.

Undone by his change in circumstances, Weber muses that a “single, solid fiction always beat the truth of our scattering,” explaining, in part, the appeal of his brand of popular science books. They explain the features of the world to us hapless lay people, soothing perplexities while adding further complications: you thought you knew how it all worked, but you did not. The faith we extend to writers like Weber is, I think, the same kind of faith we put in our best fiction writers. We expect — and need — them to tell us of our world, how things work, how against all odds we make it through. With “The Echo Maker,” Richard Powers vindicates this faith, employing his trademark facility with all manner of esoteric discourse, but never letting it overcome the essential human truth of his characters.

This wouldn’t be a Richard Powers review unless I mentioned the adjectives “brainy” and “chilly.” He gets “brainy,” and earns it, introducing his readers, across his nine novels, to the intricacies of Watson and Crick, virtual reality, artificial intelligence and the ins and outs of making a good bar of soap. “Chilly” comes from people who think he can be remote at times, his narrators squinting at his characters through a microscope lens. Over the years I’ve been able to get traction with some of his novels; others have eluded me. I don’t know what a good batting average is for writers — liking or loving a single book someone has written is a gift, I think, a thing rare enough that we should cherish it. And forget the stats.

“The Echo Maker” joins my Powers favorites through the admirable harmony he achieves between his rhetorical strategies— on the life of the sandhill cranes, on the furrowed dynamism of the brain — and the travails of Mark, Karin and Weber as they try to navigate their altered territories. “How many brain parts had Weber’s books described?” Karin wonders. “A riot of free agents. ... All those Latin-named life-forms: the olive, the lentil, the almond. Seahorse and shell, spiderweb, snail and worm. ... Even a part named the unnamed substance. And they all had a mind of their own, each haggling to be heard above the others. Of course she was a frenzied mess; everyone was.” Sometimes Weber’s musings on the byways of neuropsychology overelucidate ideas and themes explored with more concision and subtlety in other sections, but small potatoes, that.

I haven’t mentioned the expert plot mechanics yet, Powers’s array of tiny enigmas and red herrings, all perfectly paced. Who left the note by Mark’s hospital bed the night of the accident, the one that sends him questing through town? And those three sets of car tracks at the accident — who was driving, and who called in the accident to the police? Was the crash a suicide attempt, as Mark comes to suspect as his condition worsens, and what do the cranes have to do with it all? Developers have their eyes on the land the birds use as their pit stop on their way up North, and in fact Karin’s ex-boyfriend heads the organization committed to preserving their wetlands. Maybe Mark saw something he wasn’t supposed to, that night on the road. This is a clumsy list of puzzles — it’s a tribute to Powers’s nimble plotting that the mysteries unfold so organically and stealthily that you are unaware of his machinations until they come to stunning fruition. I didn’t know how well I was being played until the last page.

Part of the joy of reading Powers over the years has been his capacity for revelation. His scientific discourses point to how the world works, but the struggles of his characters, whether down-and-out misfits like Mark or well-heeled magicians like Weber, help us understand how we work. And that’s where the setting — 2002, early 2003 — comes in. As the features of life after 9/11 come into focus — the engagement in Afghanistan, “that bleak, first anniversary” of the attacks, the march to war in Iraq — Powers accomplishes something magnificent, no facile conflation of personal catastrophe with national calamity, but a lovely essay on perseverance in all its forms.

Colson Whitehead’s most recent novel is “Apex Hides the Hurt.”

A version of this review appears in print on , on page 722 of the New York edition with the headline: Migratory Spirits. Today's Paper|Subscribe